On the heels of Green Day's performance ringing in the new year on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve special on Sunday night, Elon Musk has unsurprisingly found fault with the band's left-wing political message it slipped into one of its popular songs.
While singing their 2004 hit “American Idiot” during the televised performance, Green Day lead singer Billie Armstrong changed one of the song's lines from “I’m not a part of the redneck agenda” to “I’m not a part of a MAGA agenda” in a little jab at Trump supporters.
Elon Musk, one of those supporters, apparently was offended and took to X/Twitter to offer his lukewarm take on the incident.
“Green Day goes from raging against the machine,” Musk wrote, “to milquetoastedly raging for it 🤣🤣.”
It's good to know that Musk found his own tweet funny, but he might be a party of one on that — it seems the response was a bit of a head scratcher for everyone else.
Green Day goes from raging against the machine to milquetoastedly raging for it 🤣🤣
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 1, 2024
Commenters questioned how speaking out against a corrupt politician makes one “milquetoastedly raging” in favor of a political machine, and also why Musk is equating Green Day with Rage Against the Machine — but if anyone's good at tweeting first and thinking through what it means later, it's Elon Musk (and Donald Trump for that matter)!
It could also be argued that a mainstream band slipping in a jab at the political right during a nationally televised broadcast sponsored by major behemoth corporations on a national holiday is actually a fairly good example of raging against the machine.
Regardless, Billie Armstrong and Green Day have been outspoken about their dislike for right-wing conservative politicians for some time, and “American Idiot” was famously written about former President George W. Bush, back when it seemed he was the worst president this country could possibly ever have (ah, how naïve we were).
The message of the protest song still resonates today as we're still fanning away the crop dust of Donald Trump's un-silent and deadly presidency.
And if Elon Musk actually wants to point the finger at a celebrity who once embraced liberal causes but then took a wildly hard right turn after becoming a billionaire, he might want to look at the milquetoast in the mirror.
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